Bureaucratically speaking, the Doritos take it, under the recent restrictions on student bake sales in New York City public schools. That is, unless the parents who plan to stage a “bake-in” at City Hall on Thursday can persuade officials to overturn the regulation.

The rule, which school officials say is aimed at tackling obesity, allows PTAs to hold bake sales once a month or weekdays after 6 p.m. Otherwise only fresh fruits and vegetables and any of 27 packaged items that meet city Health Department guidelines on calories, fat and sodium can be sold at schools.

Some parents have accused school officials of promoting processed food.

The battle over bake sales, a tenacious civic tradition, has struck a deep chord with home cooks and food historians. Whether in the chaos of New York City or in the quiet of a rural village, bake sales evoke a sense of comfort and trust through the intimacy of cooking, in slices of layer cake, lemon bars, tollhouse cookies, hermits, muffins, pies. (Or, in the case of some of the more ambitious New York City parent-cooks protesting this week, the empanadas, mini-spanakopitas, vegetable calzones and vegan chocolate cake.)

Helen Martineau-Kraus has two daughters at the Neighborhood School in the East Village and likes to bake carrot cupcakes and pumpkin muffins with them for bake sales. (She once made mini-spanakopitas, but said they were too much work and went too fast.) Bake sales connect parents and children at the school, she said.

“Everybody contributes, everybody feels more like they are part of the school community,” she said. “They try things that other people have baked. In such a big city it’s really nice to have that small community feeling.”

Other parents, at a time when the schools have been devastated by budget cuts and the recession has squeezed so many wallets, said it is hard to match bake sales for fund-raising.

Geraldine Neary, who has three children at the Renaissance Charter School in Jackson Heights, Queens, said the weekly bake sales at her school, netting between $200 and $300, raised enough money to send 11 students to see the Mayan ruins in Mexico last year.

She is famous for her Rice Krispie Buns, which she makes with semisweet dark chocolate instead of marshmallows. The bake-sale money has also gone to send students to the Adirondacks for a four-day “nature’s classroom” in the summers, quite a benefit for a school where she said 60 percent of the students meet the federal poverty standard.

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Lars Klove for The New York Times

“A lot of families in our school don’t have money, but if they’re baking something they feel they are contributing,” said Ms. Neary, a past president of the PTA. “If they can’t give me money and they can’t give me time, they give me some brownies, they give me some cupcakes.”

School officials say parents have misinterpreted the ban as an endorsement of junk food.

“We’re not saying you should eat Doritos,” said Eric Goldstein, chief executive of School Food and Transportation for the Department of Education. “We’re not telling you what you can feed your child or not feed your child. If you want to send in with your child 15 cupcakes you can do so. That probably wouldn’t be advisable. But what we’re talking about is the selling of food. We’ve taken a good long look at this.”

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He said that 40 percent of the 1.1 million city schoolchildren are overweight or obese and that restricting the sale of baked goods was just “one piece in a holistic wellness puzzle,” coming after the school system had replaced much of the food in its vending machines with items lower in calories, fat and sodium. Listing the ingredients of food for sale in school is essential to monitoring what students eat, Mr. Goldstein said.

But Laura Shapiro, a food historian and author, said the city’s argument was “exactly the kind of thinking that sent us down the road of packaged, industrial junk food in the first place.”

Big food companies, she said, came “roaring out of World War II, producing every kind of food and getting people to eat this stuff,” and “that was the start of a kind of war between the food industry and American home cooks, which this bake-sale flap shows is not over.”

She added: “Americans came to accept a kind of distance between themselves and food. You wouldn’t trust it if it wasn’t wrapped up and labeled. Now, farmers’ markets are in vogue — we love to exalt in that — but for many decades you only bought a bag of potatoes, cut up and wrapped and predone.”

Now, she said, “we’re supposed to believe that a packaged chocolate-chip cookie is preferable to a homemade one, not on the basis of taste, texture or the quality of the ingredients, but because it came from a factory and has a nutrition label.”

In any case, there is also the matter of what to call these erstwhile bake sales. Among the more cynical suggestions from a few boiling-mad parents were names like “prepackaged, corporate junk-food sale.”

The education department is trying to persuade parents and students to hold food-free fund-raising events, perhaps selling T-shirts, pencils, notebooks, shoelaces or handmade beaded jewelry instead. One option it suggests is selling exercise: the buyer pays for the student to run a certain number of laps around a park or track.

Call it a “running-laps sale?” Inspired idea, no doubt, but it doesn’t quite roll off the tongue.

Correction: March 24, 2010

An article last Wednesday about efforts to overturn a restriction on the sale of homemade food at bake sales in New York City schools referred incorrectly to an action planned by the City Council. Gale A. Brewer, a Democratic council member from Manhattan, said she will introduce a resolution asking the Department of Education to overturn the regulation; the council has not scheduled a hearing about the regulation.

A version of this article appears in print on March 17, 2010, on Page D3 of the New York edition with the headline: Taking the Bake Out of Bake Sale. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe